The Laboratory of Love, page 22
The nearby pearl of light overcomes my unwillingness to rise, tugs me toward its wand of dripping wax.
Shivering, I lift my body from bed, shrug on clothes, move toward the desk.
Face the open notebook aglow with candlelight, confront his violation of it.
At first, I suppose that at some point in the night my somnolent self ascended to scrawl the substance of a dream. Yet the marks do not resemble an identifiable script, appearing to be neither Arabic nor Sanskrit nor characters of Oriental cast, less those of any Western language; rather than words, they approximate a combination of crudely sketched concrete nouns and, possibly, symbols of intangible concepts. Runes. More exactly, hieroglyphics. While failing to adhere to a straight line, either horizontal or vertical, they do not look to have been placed haphazardly. There is no indication that this is the feverish work of some dream-dazed being; no sense of an intruder’s furtive, hasty effort. In both colour and shade, the carefully employed ink precisely matches that which is contained within my pen. I pick up the implement from its unassuming position beside the notebook. Try to detect the warmth of a hand’s recent grip, fail to reach a definite conclusion.
What author other than me could be responsible for this coded composition? Is it the work of an invasive ghostwriter? The classified communication of some secret agent in whose covert operation I am unwittingly involved? I check the door, discover its bolt undrawn. Sliding the bar in place, I wonder if my apparent carelessness in regard to both unextinguished candle and unlocked door might have resulted from retiring preoccupied to bed. Did the evening’s writing somehow disturb me? An aspect of the material was unusually upsetting? Instead of seeking to answer this question through referral to my most recently composed words, I study the puzzling page further. Certain stylistic flourishes of its script—a slant of line, the curve of a curl—almost look familiar; my mind is nudged by suspicion that it contains a deciphering key. I gaze at the scattered symbols until my focus unlocks. The hieroglyphics blur, shift, double upon themselves; then they seem to lift toward me, to assume a third dimension. For a moment, it seems possible to hold the substance of this unrequested communication in my hands; understand it by its texture, shape, weight. Then my vision corrects itself and the hieroglyphics possess a purely alien aspect again. I shiver not only from several centuries of the cold preserved within these stone walls and turn to the notebook’s previous page, gain comfort from sight of line after straight line of clear words, sensible sentences, plain paragraphs. As quickly as it arrived, my sense of reassurance fades. Prose that seemed elusive and rich before sleep now strikes me as unsatisfying, blunt, bare.
Blow out the candle, return to bed. As if impatiently awaiting me, sleep quickly wraps its warmth around my cold self. Just before consciousness is quelled, the inscrutable page appears illuminated upon the darkness overhead, floats at a remove that permits me to believe its meaning is contained not within each elusive element but rather in the larger design they shape.
A variety of Rorschach.
A wing, I think, as feathered arms enfold me, sail me into darkness.
“Only the bird knows the wing,” read your penultimate postcard, delivered from Delphi after that final flight from my arms.
During the days that follow, it is possible to dismiss the initial incident as no more than an isolated accident, some freakish phenomenon. That unrelieved, unrelenting solitude will occasionally play tricks upon the mind can only be expected. Tearing the perplexing page from my notebook, on the morning after it appears, I stuff it deep into the garbage pail. My pen resumes composing paragraph after precise paragraph. Is my handwriting now particularly neat? Do my words cling with especially strict obedience to each ruled line? Am I turning to the dictionary constantly to ensure that the most commonplace words exist beyond my mind? This work is a craft, like carpentry or masonry; nothing more or less. The result of my labour pays for these rooms, this electricity, that food. Hours away from the desk are never spent dwelling upon what is written there; my words have long seemed to lack any link to me; I would falter if asked to explain their substance, purpose, meaning. Such distance between my self and my work has not previously appeared to subtract from the latter’s power. I straighten the rooms and prepare simple meals and press my ear against the wall to hear the faint, muffled chant of prayers on its other side. The building’s cleaning woman makes her weekly visit, bangs a bucket and slaps a mop over foyer, courtyard, stairs. Half of the dozen apartments facing onto the patio, both on this bottom floor and on the two above, are unoccupied; usually all hover in silence. Only infrequently does a couple visit the piso directly above mine, for several afternoon hours, with the obvious, express purpose of making loud love. The sound causes me to cringe. Has it been five or seven or ten years since I left all that behind? Since I began my endless, ineffective attempt to recreate from words the lover abducted by erasing air? To hazard even a rough calculation of that painful number is to flirt with danger; unremitting solitude can be survived only by avoiding certain sensitive subjects. This city has been chosen as my residence precisely because it is not mined with associations to a wounding past, not littered with trip wires that would detonate history’s explosive bombs. That I have failed to become known by any figment of this new landscape is something to skip over as hastily as contemplation of my notebook’s contents. If my voice often offers an extended monologue into empty air, I remind myself, this merely indicates a primal, natural need to exercise muscles of lips, tongue, throat.
Now each night I close my notebook immediately after putting down the pen. I check and recheck the door to ensure it has been bolted before bed. Sleep is entered with a degree of wariness, some suspense. Waking in the middle of several nights, I am relieved to find the room entirely dark, with not even a sliver of light intruding through tightly sealed shutters from the patio beyond. Sight of the undisturbed notebook, dawn after dawn, solidifies a sense of re-established safety. Perhaps one morning the candle on the desk looks shorter than when blown out the night before. It seems possible, on a subsequent day, that my empty pen had been half full of ink upon being set down before sleep. Yet as long as the notebook remains unviolated, I am able to disregard these signs as easily as I do my endlessly recurring dreams of love.
“Only the wing knows flight,” your last postcard told me from Tangier, completing the riddle to which our experience would now forever be reduced.
Just when the first incident has almost been forgotten, a second occurs.
This time I waken with the clear sense of his touch upon my shoulder; it is an impression so definite that the mirror might conceivably reflect a handprint’s singular shape and unique lines upon my skin. Insufficiently experienced to realize the futility of my action, I leap from bed, stumble naked through dimness, feel for the door. It has been left ajar tonight. The courtyard looms vacantly; other apartments are dark; silence seeps. As if from the bottom of a well, I look toward the square of exposed sky that spreads two storeys above. A quarter-moon is visible; its sickle scythes my mind, carves a forbidden shape upon my memory.
The crescent of your body against mine; your arched throat beneath my lips.
The notebook lies defiantly open on the desk. I squint at a fresh confusion of characters sketched upon a page. Are these hieroglyphics identical to those of the first incident? Do they replicate what I discarded? I slowly draw my face away from them, search for the shape of a wing to emerge from their mass, fail to discern any larger design. Flipping to my most recently written page, I discover it has been torn from the notebook. Now my previous day’s effort ends prematurely, abortively, in mid-sentence. Although composed only hours earlier, the missing words are typically vague to me; a final unfinished phrase does not encourage what followed to swim into memory’s murky pool. It is unlikely I can recreate those lost words again. When pursued tomorrow, the text may take a tack entirely different from my original intention. Assume some shattering shape; evoke unbearable emotion; lead to an unacceptable end.
I switch on lights and hunt for the missing page. Bare as a nun’s cell, uncluttered by sentimental souvenirs or mementos of romance, my rooms afford scant potential for concealment. I search the same few possible places any number of times without success. Before turning off the lights, I deliberate over the notebook for another moment. In what might hopefully be received as a gesture of appeasement, to discourage future theft of my words, I leave the page of hieroglyphics intact. His page, I think automatically, again. There is no reason to suspect that the intrusive writer must be male, except for the weight of historical record: every rape of my heart has been performed by a man.
Taken the first time by surprise, still a child, I naively believed he was struggling to penetrate my nave and apse.
Over the course of the following days, it becomes surprisingly difficult to proceed with my text. Surely the fact that each day’s labour has always been undertaken with little awareness of, or reference to previously composed sentences should mitigate the damage incurred by a single missing page. Yet I find myself haunted by those several hundred stolen words—what did they say? what power did they possess?—to the point that my progress finds itself seriously impaired. It seems more and more likely that the page in question was taken not because it happened to be the last one written but because it contained my most valuable sentences, least replaceable thought. Long hours are wasted studying the fresh set of hieroglyphics from wistful hope that decoding them might not simply reincarnate my abducted material in its original form but, more than that, convey love’s truth in a fashion less flinching and more evolved than my own abilities could achieve. Yet his signs and symbols insist upon growing increasingly confusing with extended study, despite almost seeming to plead for rather than resist my comprehension now. While previously able to concentrate upon the work at hand with such intensity that only one moment would seem to pass between sitting at the desk at morning and rising from it at evening, my attention currently becomes drawn, time and again, to the world beyond my rooms. Eventually, I am always listening for the street door to open, for his footsteps to cross the courtyard, for his voice to prick the skin of silence. Always waiting, in bed, for his hand to pluck my blanket’s shroud, to cup my hidden heart.
You mumbled in sleep the foreign language of your dreams, offered your most subterranean secrets to my wakened ears, released fantasies of escape from our imprisoning passion out of their deep, dark cave.
My gesture of appeasement fails.
On the next occasion I am disturbed, candlelight reveals that he has absconded into the night with twenty pages of my text. Just as many sheets of hieroglyphics have been left in their place. At first, I am more concerned with what has been given to me than with what has been taken away. Having access to multiple examples of his symbols may aid in their deconstruction; perhaps analysis of significantly repeated combinations holds the key to deciphering a code. It swiftly becomes apparent, however, that each page contains hieroglyphics so unique from those of others that they might be the language of a distinct civilization, of some unrelated form of life. As my head grows heavy and dull from fruitless study, I become aware that the landscape of skin touched by his rousing hand throbs with steadily intensifying pain. Examination in the mirror reveals not a bruise but rather a handprint on my shoulder. When the mark refuses to wash off, however scrupulously scrubbed, I inspect it further. A wing, I dully think, covering the shape with an awkward bandage, as if it were an obscenity that required censoring beyond any afforded by a shirt.
The wounds you left refused to heal for years, insisted upon commemorating the damage inflicted by a thousand and one betrayals.
The twenty pages that have been ripped from the notebook are not contiguous, I discover; it is rather a case of three missing here, of four taken there. Resulting textual gaps are of a breadth that each remaining portion of prose might belong to a separate manuscript. My mind lacks the power to cross these dozen yawning chasms, to seam together the material on their distant sides. My work seems hopelessly mutilated, butchered far beyond the point of repair. Love, I can only grimace, as usual just able to recall my subject’s most general gist; after all, my theme is always the same. Instead of embarking upon an effort to recreate my text from scratch, I sketch without purpose upon a blank page. The idle activity is surprisingly satisfying, like soothing a troublesome itch. Meaningless lines gradually float a question into my mind. Can I be drawing his unseen image? Has my hand unwittingly traced his unglimpsed face?
All photographs of you have long been abandoned, lost, destroyed; the shape of your mouth and the slant of those grey eyes exist only in a black cavern located deep beneath the surface of memory, far beyond possibility of mental excavation.
I gaze at the doodled designs until realizing, with a shudder, that they bear a certain resemblance to his hieroglyphics.
The next time, I am prepared.
Immediately alert at his waking touch, in shoes and clothes left on for sleep, I spring from bed. Rush past the burning candle, scarcely glance at the notebook spread open beneath a flame shaken wildly by my swift passage. Tonight the door has been left further ajar behind his departing back, as if to encourage me to slip through its gap and attempt pursuit. Yet my rapid response goes unrewarded: the courtyard taunts with its vacancy; unfilled by his form, the street door gapes mockingly wide. Stepping from my building, I look in both directions. Too narrow to allow automobile access and only one block long, Calle Fernán Caballero is obviously deserted. He has already slipped up San Eloy to my right or stolen from view around the church at the street’s other end. I turn uncertain eyes toward the cobblestones. They shine from the nightly effort of street cleaners who, after the general population has forsaken the streets for sleep, loose hoses and brooms upon the pavement and refresh the city for another soiling day. A single set of footprints, defined by being drier than the surrounding surface, urge me to follow their lead toward the left. I place one shoe upon a print, try to determine similarity in size. Bend down to learn from close inspection whether his sole is smooth or has a textured tread. Rise before arriving at an answer. There is no time to linger; with every moment, he moves farther away. Lifting my eyes only once, to find the moon has achieved half its full potential, I quickly follow the trail left for me, submit my gaze to the silver street.
By the time I return home, the sky has lightened to grey and the city is slowly waking. Wearied by a long, fruitless search, I fumble to unlock my building’s door. The key refuses to turn. A forceful push on heavy wood, painted dark brown and studded with brass, produces no result. Suddenly the door is opened from the other side. Eyes confront me coldly from a face surrounded by a scarf made from the same grey cloth as the habit of the nun. Apologetically, I step backward. My mistake is explainable. As though some secret link existed between the structures, the door of the building in which I live and that of the adjacent convent are identical in both colour and design.
Despite brightening dawn, my shuttered rooms retain near total darkness. The candle that was left burning has been reduced to a lifeless pool of wax. Without bothering to glance at the notebook on the desk, lacking the strength to face his latest mischief, I fall fully clothed upon my pallet. Exhaustion fails to encourage unconsciousness to come; sleep during day is alien to me. I lie stiffly beneath the blanket, press my eyes tightly closed, review the path of my search through the city of night. See that success was doomed almost from the start: when his footprints began to fade before reaching Fernán Caballero’s end; when they disappeared entirely in front of the closed church at the limit of the block. How despite this evidence that he evaporated inside the sacred structure, and without a trail to follow, I press onward: into the maze of La Macarena, across the bridge to Los Remedios and then Triana, up Avenida de la Constitución’s wide sweep, through the pooled shadows of Parque de Maria Luisa, all the way to Nervión. I peer into each infrequent stranger’s face from foolish belief that his features will announce themselves to my eyes; I hope that from one of those unfamiliar forms might float pheromones whose unique chemical composition would be known to my senses from his fleeting visits to my rooms. At the inkiest hour before dawn, I finally find myself lost, bereft of bearings, befuddled in some distant barrio crawling with edgy addicts and forlorn gypsies and scores of souls for sale. It is there, until my eyes erase the image with one blinding blink, that a possibility of him poses within the doorway of a barred bodega, awaits a buyer for his body. Something in the wide span of those winged shoulders, in the slope of that strong back. Both fit the figure my unconscious eyes have spied sitting intently at the desk, bent above my open notebook. He casts a glance toward my sleeping form upon the pallet, slightly shakes the candle’s flame with his turn of head. Puts down the pen, tears pages from their binding. Rises from the chair, reaches down to touch my shoulder. Is his expression concerned, amused, indifferent? It is there and then, at that uncertain point in my mental journey, as if now his phantom hand urges unconsciousness rather than the reverse, that I fall asleep.
